Eating our own dogfood: the key

Read the post first. This page spoils it.

“Eating our own dogfood” is a prequel to my 40-essay strategy series. It’s dated December 31, 2009, the night I’d have written it, and told by a me who doesn’t know what happens next: the cloud project that fails in 2010, the six months of work depression, and the decade of studying strategy that follows. Almost every line points at an essay in the series. Four do it loudly; the rest are for readers who know the series well.

The epigraphs and the image

• Martial: “Art alone is not enough for a cook.” In 2009 I’d have read this as craft plus tasting. After my cloud project failed in 2010, Danny Sabbah told me “Being right isn’t enough,” the missing second half of “My superhero origin story” (essay 1). It led, eventually, to “Mediums, messages, movements” (essay 18).
• “The cook should have the taste of his master.” Eating your own dogfood, in Latin. But the master is the diner, and we cooked to our own taste: “We were our own first customer.” In “My superhero origin story” (essay 1), the team was “building for themselves”; in “Make it a movement” (essay 19), it’s about them, then us. Martial also joins the series’ classical voices, Marcus Aurelius in “Be A Bill (?)” (essay 38) and Spinoza in “Ditches on both sides” (essay 25).
• Jobs: “Real artists ship.” My creed in the 1.0 endgame, and the question I waved off: what “ship” means once software lives on the web. See 2005’s “Cloud or SaaS or bust” in “Choose Wisely” (essay 34). Jobs also turns up in “The A-Team (alpha)” (essay 3), “Do the impossible” (essay 20), and “The art of creating power” (essay 23).
• Remy in Ratatouille (2007). My usual movie still, from 2009 me’s own era. Pixar also points at the Pixar atrium in “Project Whitewater” (essay 8).

The four loud ones

• “I took it to my boss, and then to his boss … It was the rational answer. We were, after all, Rational. I let it go.” “Choose Wisely” (essay 34): “Raleigh, 2005 … Cloud or SaaS or bust … says what you say makes sense by some principle, but not in practical reality. You acquiesce … you chose poorly.” And “Near-death experience” (essay 14): “it was the rational decision. But sometimes … great strategy isn’t rational.”
• “Strategy, the real thing, was what executives were for.” “My superhero origin story” (essay 1): “I can’t blindly trust others to be in charge of strategy.” And “Carry That Weight” (essay 33): when I was younger, “strategy was PURELY an intellectual exercise.”
• “Whoever built the developer tools of the future, it was going to be someone with resources like ours.” In “My superhero origin story” (essay 1), we thought Rational Team Concert would become “what GitHub ultimately became.” In “The art of creating power” (essay 23), David beats Goliath. Here IBM is Goliath.
• “I couldn’t imagine working on anything else.” In “My superhero origin story” (essay 1), I “found a different job in IBM to escape Rational.” In “We Are Here” (essay 30): “The closest I ever came to leaving IBM was 2011.”

The quiet ones, in order

• Kurt Bittner “believed I could do it before I did.” “Be A Barry” (essay 21): believe in someone more than they believe in themselves.
• “They didn’t let just anyone in.” “The A-Team (alpha)” (essay 3), with Jobs’s “collaborative hiring process,” and talent density in “GREAT HANDS” (addendum 1).
• “I had a good job to lose, and I bet it anyway.” “THE HERO GIG” (essay 39): when you don’t have much to lose, roll the dice.
• “Put me in, coach.” Said in both “The Show” (essay 12) and “The Avengers Initiative” (essay 27).
• “Called up to the big leagues.” “The Show” (essay 12).
• “The work speaks for itself,” twice. “Mediums, messages, movements” (essay 18): “You’d better spend literally half your energy on great comms.”
• “You could throw a pass to anyone on that team and they’d catch it.” Chris Webber on the NBA, in “GREAT HANDS” (addendum 1).
• “Everyone was smart. I mean everyone.” The epigraph of “THE HERO GIG” (essay 39): “We’re all smart, Jeremy.”
• “The best and the brightest.” “Ditches on both sides” (essay 25): Robert McNamara, the “best and brightest” technocrat.
• Dave Thomson and Jean-Michel Lemieux in Ottawa. Jean-Michel, later CTO of Shopify, is one of the profiles “The A-Team (alpha)” (essay 3) asks you to click.
• The team succeeds or fails together. “The whole-team approach” (essay 7): “you succeed or fail as a team.”
• You do not learn by agreeing with people, and arguing “about the architecture, never about titles.” “Come Together” (essay 28), where the arguments weren’t about “what should my title be?”
• Get it done or get out of the way. “Tiki-Taka” (essay 22): Sergio Roberto gets out of Messi’s way.
• Erich opening a hard review with what went well. “YOU ARE NOT NORMAL” (essay 37): an older mentor “made a positive difference.”
• Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, right before “I wanted to be him.” In “Be A Bill (?)” (essay 38), the Meditations are the cure for wanting to be someone else.
• “I wanted to be him … a classic book of my own.” “Be A Bill (?)” (essay 38): “2008 … you idolize … Erich Gamma … you too will write classic books.” And the book in “My superhero origin story” (essay 1).
• “A pretty good follower.” By 2017 I wasn’t: “Leadership, followership, and liminal spaces” (essay 11).
• Design reviews that felt like Christmas morning, and reworking the UI live with Jen Hayes. “Strategy by design” (essay 6): IBM Design.
• “Products would come and go; the platform would last,” then “the platform needed a first killer product.” “PRESSURE IS A PRIVILEGE” (essay 13): we were “in a product mode,” not a “platform mode.”
• “Collaboration … was the whole game.” “There was an idea” (essay 17): “IT’S … LITERALLY … EVERYTHING.”
• “It was a great notion.” “PRESSURE IS A PRIVILEGE” (essay 13) and “Sometimes A Great Notion” (essay 36).
• “We ate our own dogfood.” Years later I switched to “drinking our own champagne.” 2009 me hadn’t yet.
• Erich’s dashboard and the Toronto power outage; “everyone pinged Ritchie.” Scale breaks everything in “It turns out transformation is hard” (essay 9); uptime in “Innovation under fire” (essay 5).
• “We were our own first customer. We were the people this was for.” “My superhero origin story” (essay 1): the team was “building for themselves.” “Make it a movement” (essay 19): it’s about them, then us.
• The “…Development and Governance” joke, then “control and traceability and approvals.” “My superhero origin story” (essay 1): from “tools developers love” to “govern the software development lifecycle.”
• “Software from our sister division, Tivoli.” In “Quality duct tape” (essay 4), Tivoli’s shift to SaaS brings me in, in 2013.
• A new build every two-week sprint, “about as fast as serious software could go.” “Innovation under fire” (essay 5): deploying “many times a day.”
• “Every developer in IBM would work in one shared place like that, bumping into each other.” “Project Whitewater” (essay 8): the Pixar atrium, and one GitHub and one Slack for all of IBM.
• “Culture change takes time, I figured. We had time.” “It turns out transformation is hard” (essay 9) and “Project Whitewater” (essay 8).
• “PowerPoint was the IDE of corporate bureaucrats” (my 2007 tweet). “Mediums, messages, movements” (essay 18): great comms partners are “a literal superpower” (“ask me how I know”).
• “They’d come around.” The diffusion-of-innovations thread: my 2008 blog post “frameworks and building blocks,” 2011’s “Being right is not enough,” and “It turns out transformation is hard” (essay 9).
• The analyst’s question about what “ship” means. My 2007 tweet to James Governor of RedMonk, and “Choose Wisely” (essay 34).
• “Like running rapids … either we all made it or none of us did.” Charlie Hill’s whitewater raft in “The whole-team approach” (essay 7), and “Project Whitewater” (essay 8).
• “Release candidates tested until we were sick of them.” “Failure is not an option” (essay 29): thirty test migrations.
• “It didn’t feel like an inflection point. It felt like a Thursday.” GitHub launched on Thursday, April 10, 2008. “It turns out transformation is hard” (essay 9): “a hard lesson about recognizing strategic inflection points.”
• “We were heads down.” “Ditches on both sides” (essay 25): set monitoring criteria to notice when the environment has changed.
• “A big stage in Orlando … the best day of my career, to date.” “Bill’s special day” (essay 16): Orlando, watsonx, and “the best day of my pretty awesome career (to date).”
• Ubuntu. Jono Bacon, of “Be A Ben” (essay 31) and “Make it a movement” (essay 19), was Ubuntu’s community manager at the time.
• Erich measuring 1.0 against what it should be. “THE NEXT LEVEL” (essay 32), and “Sometimes A Great Notion” (essay 36)’s mission versus outcomes, which I first met as Erich’s “current vs. ideal.”
• My mom thinks I became a musician. The series’ soundtrack: the Beatles in “Come Together” (essay 28) and “Carry That Weight” (essay 33), Beethoven in “Beethoven Was Deaf” (essay 35), and “Ode to Joy” in “NO ENDINGS” (essay 40).
• “I didn’t think much about the money.” “My superhero origin story” (essay 1): “how come I didn’t see more of that?!”
• Hype versus what’s real, and reading Tim O’Reilly. “DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE” (addendum 2): discerning what matters, with Tim’s “Alpha Geeks.” And O’Reilly again in “The great O’Reilly Safari peasant revolt of 2017” (essay 10).
• Amazon “ate its own dogfood, just like us.” “THE HERO GIG” (essay 39): “I could have moved to AWS in < 1 month.”
• Research teaching a computer to play Jeopardy!: “Good for them.” In “We Are Here” (essay 30), Watson Jeopardy! keeps me at IBM. From “The Show” (essay 12) on, Watson is my job.
• “I didn’t need anyone’s spreadsheet to tell me. I could feel it.” “Use The Force, Luke” (essay 24), and “Near-death experience” (essay 14): “I knew … KNEW.”
• “The most fun you could have without a compiler. But that was a hobby.” “Carry That Weight” (essay 33): strategy as an intellectual exercise.
• Gerstner’s book, enjoyed “the way you enjoy a good war story.” “Hitting the books” (essay 2): memoirs I’d read before took on new meaning.
• Danny Sabbah’s mentoring: “The kind of advice I figured I’d need someday, when I was an executive.” I needed it within a year: “Being right isn’t enough.”
• “I was comfortable. Happily, completely comfortable.” “FIRE CANNOT KILL A DRAGON” (essay 26): “Growth and comfort are incompatible.”
• “It felt like a beginning.” “NO ENDINGS” (essay 40): “They are all beginnings.”

Only “The Avengers Initiative” (essay 27) has no echo, other than a shared “put me in, coach.”

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